Anthropological Work in the Army

Te Ao Hou, Winter 1952, Page 6

Anthropological Work in the Army Peter returned from World War I with a D.S.O., the British General Service Medal, 1914–18 Star and the Victory Medal. Four times he was mentioned in dispatches. His wife was awarded the M.B.E. for her nursing services. He resumed work with the Photo: Taranaki Daily News. Sir Peter Buck and Mr Papakakura, during their student days in Dunedin, shown chasing a (stuffed) moa. The photograph was arranged by the then director of the Dunedin museum at a time when it was still believed that moas of this giant type (dinornis) were still extant when the Maoris landed in New Zealand. It is now known that the Maoris only found smaller species here to grapple with. Department of Health as Director of Maori Hygiene. His organizing ability, much sharpened by his war service, was at once apparent within and beyond the department, and he did his utmost to persuade Maori villages to adopt reforms all aimed at improving the people's health. His reports were models of clarity without much paring of detail, and his division in the department made important and rapid progress under competent, wise, sympathetic yet forceful administration. In a way it was prosaic work, but it enabled him to pick up the threads of studies interrupted by the war. On the way home to New Zealand in the battalion's transport he followed up his earlier anthropological work by measuring the heads of 424 full-blooded Maori troops. The Bernice P. Bishop Museum, Honolulu, accepted and welcomed this data and found it of great value when, in 1921, it conducted a systematic survey throughout Polynesia of the head measurements of all its peoples. Thus was forged the first link with the famous institution of which in later years he was to become director. Peter was conscious of the great and important need for the recording of Maori culture. He was a fairly early contributor to the Transactions of the New Zealand Institute and to The Journal of the Polynesian Society, which published his Evolution of Maori Clothing (1926) as a memoir. This study was an elaboration of a paper read before the Congress of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science held in Wellington in 1923. The foundations for the study were laid in 1908 when he wrote his first ethnological paper, ‘The Maori Art of Weaving’ (Dominion Museum Bulletin, No. 3). The production of his Maori clothing study was made possible by the Board of Maori Ethnological Research (now the Maori Purposes Fund Board), which still assists financially the Polynesian Society to publish its memoirs and other Maori material. Peter (in the technological field), the late Sir Apirana Ngata (famous for his collection of classic chants, dirges and laments), and the late Sir Maui Pomare (mythology was his province) were mainly responsible for the formation of the old Board. I began with the process of weaving, said Peter later to a large gathering in Ngati Poneke Hall, that I learned from Tira Hori, one of the Whanganui women who was a skilful weaver. Her husband,

Hori Pukehika, used to say, ‘He mea whangai’ (she has been fed), which means that when she was young and wanted to learn she got her instruction and then made a rough sampler … One of the elders would then take Tira to one of the sacred places or tuahu. The sampler was placed on that tuahu. The old man lit a fire and he took some puha (sour thistle) and ran the leaves over the fire, and then as he recited a ritual chant he fed the puha to Tira. She swallowed it and that sealed the knowledge that she would have to weave, be skilful with her hand, be quick to pick up new patterns, and become an accomplished weaver—and Tira Hori did …’ In the process of trying to find out more about the native crafts Peter began to wonder about the crafts of peoples in outer Polynesia. How much was brought by the various ancestors of the Maori from Polynesia to New Zealand? In his monograph, The Evolution of Maori Clothing, he says, ‘From the available data it would seem that both diffusion and evolution have played their part, but the honours are with the latter.’ In later years he was able to prove that the Maori weaving technique, the forms of carving, pa construction and protective works, were all developed in New Zealand and by the Maori people themselves, and do not exist elsewhere in Polynesia. This was a most momentous deduction, and it was reached only after an opportunity to see more of the Pacific world had been presented to him.